Friday, March 28, 2025
Kim Taylor’s vibrant story quilts, rich in history and personal meaning, are now on display in the Art Alcove at the Freeport Recreation Center.
Taylor, a self-taught textile artist who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and attended Brooklyn Tech High School and Brooklyn College, has spent over a decade weaving narratives into fabric, using quilting as both an artistic and emotional outlet. A resident of Baldwin, she is a speech-language pathologist at a school for the deaf in Queens.
Her journey into quilting began in 2008, when she was inspired by the historic election of President Barack Obama. Wanting to express her emotions in a medium deeply rooted in her ancestry, she researched textile traditions in West Africa and taught herself quilting.
“I felt that I wanted to express myself artistically, but I don’t consider myself an artist, and I wanted to find a medium that was used by my ancestors,” Taylor said. “I did a little research on that, and I discovered that many of the women in West Africa are master textile artists, so I wanted to teach myself something, and I started doing some art quilting.”
Her first quilt, called “Full Circle, A History,” featured Obama’s face surrounded by African warriors, and incorporated the traditional Jacob’s Ladder quilt pattern, a combination of four-patch and half-square triangular units arranged to creates a diagonal, stair-step effect. While it is not part of the Freeport exhibit due to space constraints, many others from Taylor’s collection are.
She describes her approach as a form of collage quilting, distinct from traditional geometric styles. Many of her pieces focus on cultural and historical narratives, including “Tree of Life,” a family-history quilt for which Taylor used old photos provided by her grandmother, with a tree in the middle.
“Juneteenth” emerged from an eye-opening experience at a Juneteenth party, which led her to create a visual representation of the holiday and later inspired her debut children’s book, “A Flag for Juneteenth.”
“When I left there, I was angry that I knew nothing about — I had never heard of Juneteenth, and so I created a quilt about it,” Taylor said. The book, published by Neal Porter Books, features her original quilt illustrations.
“I did 23 original quilts as illustrations rather than paintings,” she said, “and that process took a year and two months.”
Among Taylor’s most personal works is her latest quilt, “My Life,” an autobiographical piece that took two years to complete. “You read my quilt by reading all of the squares,” she said. “You follow me through the quilt by a yellow ribbon that I have in my hair, in all of the squares, you know it’s me.”
Taylor’s work is labor-intensive, with each quilt requiring months — sometimes years — to complete. “I usually feel compelled to finish it before I start something else,” she said. “And then once I’m finished with a quilt, it usually takes months and months before I can start something else. It’s really emotional, like an emotional journey, and I need to rest in between.”
Despite being largely self-taught, she hopes to deepen her quilting skills through hand-quilting and formal instruction. “I really feel like eventually I would like to teach myself to hand-quilt,” she said. “That’s a really hard thing to do. Your stitches have to be perfect. So that’s probably the next thing I’ll try to teach myself with very small quilts, you know? And then eventually I’d like to take a class, and really just see what other people are doing and learn more.”
Taylor continues to push the boundaries of storytelling through fabric. Having completed some 15 quilts and with around 10 on display at the Art Alcove, she hopes that viewers will make a personal connection with her work. “I hope that they are able to connect with my work, and that they’re able to see themselves in my pieces,” she said. “That’s always my goal, because I feel that we are all connected in some way.”
Her work will be on display at the Recreation Center through the end of the month. “This is the first time we’ve displayed quilts in our Art Alcove,” Larry Dresner, executive director of the Long Island Arts Council at Freeport, wrote in a text to the Herald. “It truly is a unique art form. We hope everyone will come see Kim’s amazing artistry.”
More information about Taylor’s quilts and children’s book can be found on her website, materialgirlstoryquilts.com.
